Why is no one OCing their Parhelia?

I've been particapating in the parhelia 256MB thread the past coupel days, and it got me think. Why is no one OCing this card yet?

I went to powerstrip's web site and it seems they have no plans to add parhelia support to their utility.

I head over to matrox HERE and found matrox tweak utility. Here is what the readme says :

Matrox Technical Support Tweak Utility

Revision 5.02.04
----------------

Supported OS
------------
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows NT4
Windows 2000
Windows XP (Home)
Windows XP (Pro)


Supported Cards
---------------
G200 AGP and PCI Series
G400 AGP Series
G450 AGP series
G550 AGP series
Parhelia 128 AGP 4x Series

Supported Drivers
-----------------
Windows98/ME - 6.xx
NT4 - 4.xx
Windows2000 - 5.xx, 1.02.xxx

New Features
------------------
Overclocking tab.
***Please see the help section***

Main Fixes
---------------
N/A

Main known issues
----------------------------
N/A

***No technical support is provided with this utility***

***Using the over clocker feature may result in damaging
our graphics card. The user must take the necessary steps
to provide ample cooling to the graphics card.***

***This will be the last release of our tweak utility***


It sounds like it would work, but i don't have a parhelia to test it out. All you parhelia users, let me know if you are using this utility let me know what you are doing with it.

What parhelia users???

I think they sold like 100 cards, right?

LOL. I thought the sold a good number of them. Maybe I'll ask in the MURC forums

Yeah, OC'ing one of these cards is like the people who overclock Pentium 133's and such. A waste of time and who in their right mind would be using one in the current day and age?

slipknot said:

I've been particapating in the parhelia 256MB thread the past coupel days, and it got me think. Why is no one OCing this card yet?

Click to expand...

Well, the overclock util is done by percentages. It's also more or less permanent.

I gave someone an O/C Parhelia thread a while ago. Basicly, the retail core doesn't have much room unless you go to high end air or water.

In otherwords, the stock HS/F just it's job with a little headroom. It will hardly do much more than that. Not a bad thing, of course-- the fan is darn quiet compared to my AIW Radeon or 8500. The core is pretty big so it ended up being a bigger fan yet lower RPM fan.

it can run 3 screens and give crisp text on a tv and 512bit core...its to bad they rape you on the price

You also gotta remember that the Parhelia runs at 300MHz and at this speed is already limted by the architecture. The Good ole GF4 TI 4600 also runs at this clock speed but is alot less complex allowing for higher O/Cing ability.

You'd be lucky to get your Parhelia to 310MHz on the current 0.15 Micron architecture that Matrox choose.


OC-Master

OC-Master said:

You also gotta remember that the Parhelia runs at 300MHz and at this speed is already limted by the architecture.

Click to expand...

The Parhelia's Retail core is at 220MHz. Bulk is 200MHz. I've seen up to 310MHz core on water.

MospeadasDark said:

The Parhelia's Retail core is at 220MHz. Bulk is 200MHz. I've seen up to 310MHz core on water.

Click to expand...

Can you point me to some before and after benchmarks at that speed? I would love to see the speed difference an OC Parhelia has over a stock card.

There are some people with Parhelias around here. MosqueadesDark (sp) if I'm not mistaken. http://oc3dmark.octeams.com/db/parheliadb.html

-PC

slipknot said:

Can you point me to some before and after benchmarks at that speed? I would love to see the speed difference an OC Parhelia has over a stock card.

Click to expand...

Depends on what you want. There are a bunch of synthetic ones done by Matrox Beta Boys(because up until recently there was no O/C util) and a Q3 one..which I don't play at all.

There's a 3DMark thread of O/C'd Parhelias: http://forums.matroxusers.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36782&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

I don't really see any game results. Reason I point this out is because Matrox never optimised for 3Dmark. For example, o/c'd Parhelia's still score like 3000 marks lower than a 8500's in 3Dmark but say UT2k3 Parhelia beats even the GF4 4600 when AA, AF, or both are enabled.

Once I get my waterblock I'll get to overclocking the P too. Most likely I'll post results here also.

Cullam3n said:

There are some people with Parhelias without here. MosqueadesDark (sp) if I'm not mistaken. http://oc3dmark.octeams.com/db/parheliadb.html

-PC

Click to expand...

Yeah, takiwa managed to convince me to post 'em. I still don't like it as a bench however. Never did -- but he was buggering me to post ever since my 8500 days when he took control of the management=)

Can you give us some UT2003 benches ?

MospeadasDark said:

Yeah, takiwa managed to convince me to post 'em. I still don't like it as a bench however. Never did -- but he was buggering me to post ever since my 8500 days when he took control of the management=)

Click to expand...

Haha that's funny.

Yeah we'd like to see some game benches, UT2003 is acceptable.

-PC

Also you need to raise the AGP Voltage to get anything decent, as the Parhelia eats voltage like a rabid shark!

Cullam3n said:

Haha that's funny.

Yeah we'd like to see some game benches, UT2003 is acceptable.

-PC

Click to expand...

Gimme till the weekend. I have a crazy 10hr/daily work schedule=\

edit: If you don't feel like waiting: http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=133673

I posted link to a reviewer that did the UT2k3 bench. He's running a XP2200 on a KT266 chipset. I'm runnin a MP1200 on a MPX chipset(dual chipset). If ur proc speed is closer to his then you might as well look there first. UT2k3 is more heavily CPU intensive too.

Thanks forthe MURC link MospeadasDark. that is exactly what I was looking for. Some of those scores are pretty impressive considering the smal overclocks. Something tells if it MAtrox coudl have optimzed the core more and got it to run at the 325Mhz as the other GPUs out there, it would really increase the performance.

And don't forget about some 700+ Mhz ddr goodness on the memory side too.......

slipknot said:

Thanks forthe MURC link MospeadasDark. that is exactly what I was looking for. Some of those scores are pretty impressive considering the smal overclocks. Something tells if it MAtrox coudl have optimzed the core more and got it to run at the 325Mhz as the other GPUs out there, it would really increase the performance.

And don't forget about some 700+ Mhz ddr goodness on the memory side too.......

Click to expand...

Well, it's no secret that Matrox didn't exactly get what they originally intended out of the card. There is to be a revision planned around spring of the coming year. The Parhelia2 won't be out till at least next summer.

Also, I wish people would stop saying how the Parhelia needs some kinda bandwidth saver technique. If you even took one look at it's memory you would know that the P's bandwidth is extreme overkill for *any* card. The only benefit it would have it a fast memory clear--which the card does have. So please, no more "if it only had Hyper-Z-like tech" rubbish.

Still, for me, it's fast enough. I know more than a few here that would pick up the P if the pricetag wasn't so high. I'm mostly in it for the Image quality and driver support. Knowing by default that the latest driver will *always* fix whatever you request and not break something else is a very good thing.

I don't fancy going thru' 10 different drivers to see which works for what game and which is the fastest. It used to be fun with ATi/NV but I'm trying to keep my Windows install longer than a few months now=P

MospeadasDark said:

Also, I wish people would stop saying how the Parhelia needs some kinda bandwidth saver technique. If you even took one look at it's memory you would know that the P's bandwidth is extreme overkill for *any* card. The only benefit it would have it a fast memory clear--which the card does have. So please, no more "if it only had Hyper-Z-like tech" rubbish.

Click to expand...

I'm sorry, but I disagree with you here. EVER new graphipcs card needs to have some form of occlusion culling nowadays. With the way games are becoming more and more complex, it doesn't make since for the GPU to render every object in a scene if that object can't be seen. Even with the INSANE bandwidth of the parhelia, it is wasting too much drawing objects behind walls that you can't see. It could be busy doing something more constructive (like drawing the parts of the screen that we can actually see)

Hum......There may even be a way to test my little theory.

1)
Find someone with an 9700PRO card
Find someone with an 8500LE card
Find someone with a TI4600 card

2)
Benchmark the cards in a very complicated 3D scene like the natue test in 3dmark, or Villagemark.

3)
Find a way to disable HyperZ in the 8500, HyperZ II in the 9700 and LMA II in the TI4600

4)
Re-benchmark the cards with these features disabled. And you will see how much having occlusion culling technology helps.


ANYONE WANT TO DO THIS

I was thinking that high res AA/AF on would pretty much be good proof that the P doesn't need any of it. While othercards that lack the bandwidth pretty much die off.